As many people will have noticed, things haven't been too rosy in the KDE world
for the last few days. Virtually all of our critical services have been broken,
including cvs, mailing lists, kde.org mail addresses and a number of web sites
(such as developer.kde.org). Unsurprisingly, this has meant that KDE 3.0 Beta
2 (originally scheduled for Monday) has been delayed.

The problems we've been suffering are the result of a number of relatively
trivial problems all occurring simultaneously: a DoS attack meant that some
planned maintenance on cvs.kde.org needed to be performed immediately,
and this took longer than expected because it caused a schedule clash. At the
same time the machine room containing master was being cleared of Polychlorinated
Biphenyls, a toxic group of chemicals leaving no alternative but to take down
the machine (for more info on PCBs see http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/pcb/).

Happily, I can now tell you that thanks to a great deal of generosity and hardwork
by David Faure (Mandrake) and the admin team, Dirk Mueller, Adrian Schroeter
(SuSE), Stephan Kulow and Chris Schlaeger (SuSE), we have been able to set up
a replacement cvs server (kindly paid for by IBM) in the SuSE offices. Martin
Konold now has access to master, so mail and other services will be coming
back on line too. In addition, George Staikos can take credit for annoying
encouraging dfaure, and 'making stupid jokes'. ;-)

All of our data is intact, so the new release, while a few days late, will continue
as planned. Things will take a few days to sort themselves out, so please don't
all rush to update at once. Many thanks are due to everyone involved in sorting
this out.

Comments

The CVS is available again (at its new location, so remove any /etc/hosts
entries!), but due to the lack of logging for cvs commits (mail setup issues),
it is currently read-only.
Any commit will fail, so don't lose time typing log messages just to see
the commits being rejected :}
This will hopefully get sorted by tomorrow.

First, kudos to everyone who worked so hard to resolve the situation. I am eagerly looking forward to Beta2. Now, I have a lot of questions :)

Does this mean that the CVS has permanently moved to SuSE? What kind of hardware did IBM donate? How did they get involved? Did they volunteer or someone approached them? Where is "master" situated? Can we maintain shadow mail/list/CVS servers, which are kept in sync, and then brought into service just by switching the DNS records?

Just for the record I'm from England not Germany. I thought that I was just issuing a fairly mild rebuke at the concept of relating a DoS with killing people. I didn't really want to start a flame war.
Actually what interests me most at the moment is whether kde3 will correct the broken kio_help in KDE2.2.2.

For help to work, you need libxml2 (this is not the same thing as libxml) and libxslt. These are dependencies for kdebase - which versions do you have installed?

You need to have installed the help - some early versions of the RedHat RPMs inadvertantly didn't install it. Do you have the most up to date ones available? I'm assuming you have RedHat, as the bug report above is referring to RedHat. Do you have anything in $KDEDIR/share/doc/HTML/// ? You should have, depending on the application, an index.docbook, an index.cache.bz2, and perhaps some .png files if the document has screenshots.

If you go into one of these directories and run "meinproc index.docbook", do you get any more error messages?

The bug reports referenced above look rather like packaging errors, but there's not enough information provided to even investigate them.

Good for you that you can chuckle. Can we, nonetheless, stop this crap? I actually like a good brawl (a good one, I said ;-), I like hefty jokes. But jokes like this one are tasteless and bound to get people offended.

I have been so blinded by KDE for the last year that I've forgot to look on "the other side".
Now it appeares even the GNOME guys do vector themes, AA, nice file management etc - and how nice it can look:http://jimmac.musichall.cz/themes.php3?skin=2

on the off chance you read the actual notes about it you will see that he DOESNT reccomend this to anyone on less than an intel 400Mhz and says that this is very slow on a PPC.

hrm, sounds like a real show stopper to me, seeing as I can get 90% of KDE's effects to work very fast on my 400Mhz PPC, and resonably on my 333 AMD K6.

lets face it, KDE 3.0 is a marked improvment of speed and features, just becase GNOME has icons that can change size well dosent mean that they better. I mean personally I think haveing a usable file dialog is 10000x more important that some silly eye candy. For giggles ask a gnomer to change their wallpaper from the commandline... without restarting anything, when they cry that it cannot be done, fire up DCOP ;)

I think you will find that KDE 2.x and now KDE 3.0 are far more usable than anything the GNOMEs have cranked out thus far.

so please submit a patch.
i am busy makeing it possible to script KDE applications with any scripting language you chose. i think IBM/HP and compaq want that a little bit more than icons that grow and shrink. i think what tacket, qwertz and other provide is adiquate.

i would not trade dirk and davids work on KHTML for any eyecandy no matter what it does for me.

So far as scaleable icons, when I have added new ones in manually (stuff only to show up on my desktop) I usually only make one big one (48x48). From what I'm seeing here, they scale quite nicely already. No, it's not the super spiffy kind of scaling you'd get with vectored graphics... so?

As a user, I want rock solid KHTML, Javascript, improvements to the Address book, better Palm integration, performance boosts. I want, I want, I want! :) These are the make and break points of KDE. Besides, I happen to strongly prefer Liquid to Aqua after using both. KDE already looks very very sweet!

As much as I'm looking forward to seeing KDE3, what I've got now is working pretty nicely. Take your time, miss some promised release dates, and do us all proud! You KDE developer types have gotten us all used to them kinds of things, especially the proud part.

KSpread, - Like GNUmeric only it dosent crash as much and has better integration
KWord - Like Abiword only more features, granted thats not that hard
KPresenter - Like... well... i dunno
Kivio - Like dia only with a more powerful python/xml based shape engine
Kate - what gedit always wanted to be
Quanta - I think bluefish tries to be an html editor
KDevelop - makes GIDE look like a booger, but then again no one actually writes
gnome code, it just happens...
Konqi - about 1/2 the size of mozzila, which is not even a true gnome app anyway,
they just wish it was

FYI not only to all of these talk together but they are accessabe with dcop. GNOME is a lose hack of any application they can get ahold of, while KDE seems to have some method behind its development. Oh and that red carpets a real winner... I watched it hoze my mandrake box... but i give them points for trying...

KDE development may not have the alure to 1st year CS dropouts, but it seems to have a fairly stable following...

> KSpread, - Like GNUmeric only it dosent crash as much and has better integration

Have you actually tried Gnumeric > 1.0 with Guppi. It's excellent.

> KWord - Like Abiword only more features, granted thats not that hard

Abiword at least started from a stable base, i.e. the ability to do WYSIWYG printing. I can't believe anyone would write a word processor and not consider the ability to print the most vital feature! Don't knock Abiword, it may be simple - but it does the job 99% of the time.

> Kivio - Like dia only with a more powerful python/xml based shape engine

Sorry - but have you actually tried to use Kivio or Dia? I actually decided to use to produce some professional flow charts for ESA documentation and they both suck.

> Konqi - about 1/2 the size of Mozilla

But Galeon is the gnome browser and to be honest - it's what I use all the time now.

Also Evolution beats the crap out of any KDE mail/pim program and I seriously think that KDE should dump kpilot and go with gpilotd which actually works (Evolution calendar syncs beautifully with my Palm).

For the record I use KDE2.2.2 as my desktop - but that doesn't precude me from using gnome apps if I think they're better for my productivity. I'm looking forward to the next release of KOffice alot, but at the moment - I'll stick with whats best for the job.

> Abiword at least started from a stable base, i.e. the ability to do WYSIWYG printing. I can't believe anyone would
> write a word processor and not consider the ability to print the most vital feature! Don't knock Abiword, it may be
> simple - but it does the job 99% of the time.

I have to disagree. Anything that Abiword is adequate for, I've found, I might as well use vi for. Any non-trivial document I've ever written requires features not found in Abiword.

That said, KWord isn't much better. My wife, an author, can't use KWord because, as of the latest stable release, printing is still screwed up. However, at least it has styles, an absolute minimum for any document over a page or two.

One thing I *really* like about Abiword is the export to docbook. I wish KWord would adopt this. If I had more time, I'd write a couple of XSLT stylesheets to convert between the two. Actually, Abiword's export and import facilities far outshine KWords, unless you're only interested in MSWord imports, in which case KWord's is marginally better, and both are vastly inferior to StarOffice.

> For the record I use KDE2.2.2 as my desktop - but that doesn't precude me from using gnome apps if I think they're
> better for my productivity. I'm looking forward to the next release of KOffice alot, but at the moment - I'll stick
> with whats best for the job.

IMHO, unless you need rigid control over formatting, KWord is much superior to Abiword. Printing is sufficient, as long as (as I said) you aren't trying to do a resume, or something that requires true WYSIWYG.

But, in the end, StarOffice still beats the pants off of either, in both printing and features. It's a memory hog, but it is the only real alternative to MSWord for people who's jobs depend on a good word processor.

I've tried koffice numerous times in the past, and it has never lasted long enough for me to be able to create a document and save it (kword, kspread, kpresenter...), so i use gnumeric and abiword, they're fast and they just dont crash for me - it's interesting that you've tried gnumeric and found it unstable, have you tried a recent version? i use the latest ximian version from red-carpet on redhat 7.2 and it's really stable.
True abiword is lacking some features, but what it does it does well, and it has .doc export.
I've never really used gide myself, so i can't comment on that but anjuta is ok (and more like kdevelop) - however i still prefer codewarrior.
Quanta - yup that's good, (although if i just want to edit html bluefish is also very good)
konqueror is fine as a file manager, but in my opinion it's not the best web browser - that's galeon.
Kivio - never tried it, but i have used dia and it's a bit annoying.
Red-Carpet - it works for me and it's great, but i do get the impression that it's not so great for mandrake.

It really sounds like we're not comparing equals here, kde's unstable for me (on redhat 7.2, with redhat updates) and it dsounds like gnome's unstable for you on mandrake.
It's a real shame that this should be the case because there are 2 great desktops out there and it looks like the distributors don't put enough effort into testing both of them. I guess i'll have to wait and see if kde3's any better and you can try gnome2 when that comes out.

I'm a kde user, so I think I'm not too gnome oriented, but what you say is really shoking, as it's just wrong.
Kspread/Gnumeric: Not only it has less functions that Gnumeric, but I can crash it in less than 5 seconds (just adding some charts in it). Gnumeric is one of the rare Gnome/Gtk apps that really has a lead compared to KDE equivalent.
Abiword/Kword: You cannot ignore that abiword is much better at preview and wysiwyg than Kword.
Kdevelop vs Gide. Shouldn't you compare it to glade?
Quanta: If you are talking about Quanta +, I have to disagree. The functionalities of bluefish actually work. Some functionalities of quanta are just checkboxes without effect. Bluefish is really far better than Quanta+.

Konqui may use half the size of Mozilla, it is not a comparble application! Why do you compare Konqui to Mozilla?! Can you write email, do icq and compose html pages in Konqueror? I'm not even sure it can display PNG transparency. TIP: Nautilus

And I'm a KDE user. I happen to use some gnome apps because they are better for some situations.

I think Anjuta is a lot better that kdevelop ... although in it's early stage.
But probably it's a matter of preference - I prefer an IDE whith a great Editor
since this is the part I use at most when programming.
The kdevelop team did a great job but the editor is way behind what other
IDEs provide.
And I miss ksodipodi ;)

nah, kdevelop is much more like THE ide that all other ide's live up to, MS VisualStudio. It's also much more mature and stable in development than something like ajunta, but then again, it has been development in 4 years. I agree with you in the editor part tho, although scintilla, which is used by ajunta, isn't THAT much better. Once kdevelop uses the kate part (soon), it'll blow everything else away again ;)

All of you, grow up. This whole thread sounds like, "My desktop can beat up your desktop." Some like KDE, and some like GNOME. It's nice to have the choice. Even better, it's nice to have the choice of two really great FREE desktop environments. Use the applications that you think work the best or that you are most comfortable with. Knocking someone else's work is just rude (and this applies to everybody).

I don't think any of us would argue that the GNOME developers know how to make a very attractive interface. All of it *looks* great, but that's where my praise stops. You can have the hottest, most attractive looking desktop in the world, but if it doesn't make you productive than what's the point? Now I know a lot of users just want to type their essays, listen to mp3s and chat on IRC, but for those of us with work to do, GNOME is pretty but not pretty useful.